Recent Comments

Archives

Categories

Meta

essays about media

The weight of unspoken predicates has hidden itself like dark matter all around us as our body of knowledge has grown. What we know is directly proportionate to the quantity of things we’ve lost the ability to sense.

To become human, we’ve sacrificed the richness of animal vomeronasal acuity for the power of superior vision. We let go of the now for a full-color preview of what’s ahead.

To be able to see the dashboard and read the common patterns which presage the serious injury or death of other, observably similar members of our kind gives us the causal axis. Over time, this axis thickens into the spinal column which enables us to walk upright and to know our moments as a succession of days rather than as a single set of states and rules forever failing to recall the eternally-recurring accident of the non-linear now.

In possession of the pattern-marking facility of speech, we bounce these bits of airborne patter off of one another until we’ve learned to identify otherness as if by blind sonar. We learn how to manipulate the events that threaten to end us by making others move into the path of dangers which would otherwise be aiming for us. We survive by articulating our narrative of anecdotal experience in a less-forgettable way than opposing testimony.

Good and evil arise as connective givens among allied tribes of selves. An ‘us’ extends and amplifies the signal strength of our common-tongue consensus, which competes with other corporate entities of like-minded ‘other’ sets of selves. And as the arguing storylines spend centuries building roads of binding givens, we find that what prevails over aeons of gameplay is not merely an upgrade of complexity (the inverse of which itemization of the particulate fuels the thermonuclear dismantling of matter we witness as entropy’s increase) but a dimensionally-upward revolutionary inventiveness with regard to our perceptual plasticity, by which the better wielder of self-actuated spin and the more rigorous mastery of all that which resideth within no special self, but rather sets the shared substrate of multiplayer morphology we fall into with every step—the better map we can make of this ‘reality’ we scramble to assay, the stronger model of the real we wrest; and within this nearest-to-physical-truth simulator we will divine the best strategy by which to crown the winningest will among us, which might write the final word on conscious spacetime…

We find, unfailingly, that the craftiest manipulation of truth will always prevail, and that this higher ground is only ever revealed with recourse to the least-expected lie. The genius of authorship reigns undefeated and unfixable behind a multitude of masks which admit of no individual self at all.

Know the step upon which you stand, but be ready to un-know it when you climb the next.

Form vs. Void

All our finest endeavors are unfinishable, useless and irremediably flawed.

Yes, our canonic inheritance of priceless, precious and all-too-perishable artifacts will hold their form for centuries with proper care and periodic reconstruction, and it is well worth the effort to extend the lifespan of these treasures, for within their tortured, beautiful bodies hides the heartbeat of our highest humanity. Yet, it is futile to deny that all which can be seen by eye or held by hand must succumb, inevitably, to the common doom of all particulate matter. We are wax, wick and flame, and the life which we flickeringly sustain burns the vessel which contains it.

To make anything we designate as art amounts to more than merely mirroring the mirage of the real that taunts us and vexes us with its perplexing, mutable face pressed against the glass epidermis which separates our whispering within from that raucous, bewildering tempest without. In order to make art, we must wield our will with superhuman command and abandon our poor, unctious vehicles of meager ego to take flight in the soaring chariots of godly pretension parked within all our minds, in the median between all expressible sentiment. We must know the essence of dumb rock far bettter than it knows itself, and we must have the stupid, unwavering perseverence to mold it into the shape we see in our minds. Michaelangelo interrogated rock mercilessly to extract the secret David only he could intuit; he coerced a false confession from innocent stone to discover the enduring truth no man nor material alone could divine. Implacable will, skill, and a restless, relentless eye may effectively sculpt the real when driven by a rootless, unscrupulous awareness that never mistakes the shorthand iconography of consensus consciousness for the naked apprehension of the terrible void.

We are life. We are form. These spacesuits of bone and meat that track our path across the surface of the globe are but informed vortices of engaged dirt, engorged with water, provisionally worn until our waveforms dilute to noise. We spin our spawn from the vital wriggle that once upon a time kicked and clawed its way from the dark womb of the sea onto the trauma of dry land. It’s easy to forget what a hostile, horrible nightmare it was, surviving the indifferent, daily assault of mindless nature; we may well indulge ourselves with fantasies of a nurturing, abundant earth given to our dominion, but it’s a genteel conceit purchased with an uncounted, forgotten wage of blind rage, impotent fear and brutal accidents of insight by our nameless, suffering forebears.

We are form, finding passage through time’s churning abattoir by way of a compromise with the void. But we must never forget from whence we came, nor should we be seduced into a complacent subservience to the endless need that void represents. We are not the caretakers of our earth; we are its prisoners. Whatever means by which we may wrest our freedom from this rock are acceptable, so long as the ground beneath our feet does not give way before we launch our diaspora safely away.

Sons and Daughters of Origins

I am what I am; and by the same turn of phrase, I am what I’m not. These two cancel each other sufficiently to bear a child between them. And this is how the daily dialectic of self unfolds its unruly rug out from under all the heavy furniture that fills the human parlor with places to rest and ephemera to itemize.

When we follow the modelled showrooms of palatable worlds that fill the screens that now litter our field of vision, we make note of the fixed notional bodies that persist across a range of disparate roles. We are captivated by the actors themselves, especially those who seem to wholly inhabit the axis from which the apparent words, actions and affect of their characters appear to originate. We revere and fear this ultimate plasticity of form, which seems to suggest the possibility that a sort of universal Turing machine could conceivably be contrived to lie underneath us all, as common a machination as our core anatomical configuration. What part of this scintillating schema of narrative individuation is actually just a common factory default? What haven’t we yet found words with which to name, among the very particular aspects of our unique sense of ourselves, which, when shared, will show us yet another way in which we are not so different after all?

We are social animals and asocial ‘I’s wrestled around a single follicle that places us upon the epidermis of a larger construct whose countenance fills us with dread. Nothing is so repellant to our collective consciousness than the idea that we are a crowd of single cells unwittingly working against the sacrosanct interests of the single-celled self to build a global unity whose organs of differentiated, controlled functionality are bound together to build a far greater good than the good we know. What rough beast is this who shuffles our fates between its hands with unfathomably superhuman intent to form a corporate`creature capable of crawling forth from the seas of timespace to walk upright and to survey the higher dimensions that hold us? What sort of global conspiracy of power-hungry capitalist fascism hides behind the promise of transcendence that pulls us inexorably up this bloody ascent? What wicked wisdom will seduce us with wily words to cast the blessed scales from our eyes, so that we may yet submit to our own Ubermensch Adameve of Here Comes Everybody to master the jungle of possible causal storylines which insinuate a rootsystem into our past to flail its Yggdrasil filaments into the eyeball of our most fruitfully franchised future? Who will we be when we’re at home in the anthropic sponsorship of our own authorial imperative? Give up, man, on giving up, except as a function of the fleshy, firey immolation inherent in the entropic exponential incline that describes form’s liberation from void along the forward-thinking arrow of time. The reward of settled certainty you calculate with precise, complacent surety will always, only a moment after the most explicit statement of its ultimate terms, invoke the terms of its own overthrow. Boredom is a failure of imagination.

The Reverse Engineer, as postulated by me, postulates us all posthumously.

I took a draught of poisonous, impoverished idleness to sicken me into unimpeded, useless industry.

I build, with my bare hands, this fine, useless Busy-ness at the expense of my faithful constituents’ immediate concerns. I deceive them into constructing a pyramid atop my dead body, a five-dimensional funnel to launch my hatched soul into the celestial arena, for your consideration.

Uselessness is next to godliness.

Every bridge is a long, deep inhalation over centuries; the mineral ball of our earth is a blackhead of foreign matter swallowed by mistake by a displacement map of unexplored territories.

All things we may speak of are hemmed in by a hostile crowd of implied opposites.

Opposite positions contain each other as linear vessels, refracting such a delicious multiplicity of amazed light under the rainbow that we just can’t seem to get over it.

The relationship between each thing and its shadow is private, but the legal holodeck within which they work out the terms of their engagement belongs in the public domain.

A word is the blueprint for a patented, manmade object that blocks light with a recognizable signature wherever it appears.

Which means that independent observers must attach this word to other nodes in the linguistic network using the same relational architecture.

This algorithm must be inculcated into every head in order for us to settle into cities together.

All drive derived from animal lust and hunger matures, with awareness, into the fossil fuel that rockets us beyond the gravity well of our genesis.

Only idle hands learn to play.

Only those capable of playing and pretending learn how to make new things.

All new things are new to those who haven’t seen the shape of the niche which holds it.

It is important to us, individually and collectively, subjectively and objectively, that we be able to share what we see, and to be able to share ways of filtering what we see.

Going into the light is the imperative of all life. Never meet a deadline you haven’t drawn yourself.

We must try to never shy from the light of the new; nor should we shun our duty to revise history, in order to maintain the line of sight from then to now.

All attention does damage to the natural world, wherever it’s focused.

All love is penetration.

I’ve Been Sent From the Future to Get in Your Face with this Crazy Talk.

Hello, This ’n’ That. Greetings from the late, late, late show. Also known as the Very Early Show with Noise & Light (ha ha).

I know you’re juggling more nested pairs than you can count, and that you’re on a tight schedule to get every second of your year itemized for your nightly return to death…

But I believe we may be able to help each other out, if you’ll but deactivate your disbelief and modify your security settings. (Y / N)

All of creation could never have happened until it was remembered, and it never could have been written into memory without a method of recording and the means by which such information could be made to persist.

Because we can remember this world, we can assume at least that an attempt is being made to build a case for our acquittal.

So, thanks! I appreciate y’all being team players, and for including me as one of your team, even though you’ve never met me and aren’t too keen on entertaining the notion of me.

Each of us crawls out of the decision fork that unzips at the point of our parents’ dialectical fornication.

Life is motion.

Into the future we squint with eager anticipation.

As time winds down, and our dance is done with this dust storm, all particles will party harder to keep up their parity with one another.

In the future, all pawns are queens, and the rules no longer call for kings.

Spoiler alert: we kill each other and then ourselves in the name of immortality.

All focus distorts.

A [telescope / microscope / camera / academic institution / spy network] is a double ended dildo cross-cunting across vast diagonals of scale—for instance, between the eye of the hurricane to the hole of a donut.

Media on the ‘medium as message’ stage is a needle in all our arms, regulating the mean seasonal pitch of meaning (“Do you know what I mean? Do you know that I’m sane?”) like a thermostat.

Only by meeting the blinding gaze of others may we infer the common form we personalize with different disguises.

This land is my land, this land is your land, this land is merely the model for our regularly scheduled program to launch a simulacrum worthy of being called the kingdom of heaven.

1. Unentitled

1. Weddings, Weeds & Worms: an alphabet afflicted by artifice

2. Borders, Bricks & Binaries: a codex of cocks & cunts

2. Day of Beauty / Night of Ugly

Excuse me, but I have a few opinions I’d like to air. Assholes, elbows and opinions, right? A metaphorically fecund bouquet. We’re none of us very eager to smell the air from inside one another, whereas our own flatulence is never offensive to ourselves. Pet farts gross me out the worst, personally. But here, let’s go through the motions of communicating.

Today is a Saturday, the dirty grey day after Black Friday. Black & White art has always floated my goat’s boat better than art of Color, with its weepy, plangent emotional snares. This is true for books & comics, but right here I specifically mean to talk about planar art, parallelograms all as flat and splattered as Clement Greenberg’s sanitized aesthetic. Which is to say, art that hangs on walls. Which is to say, with a playful dismissive snobbishness all my own, Wall Art.

Having committed to a deprecation of the Wall Arts in favor of art for reproduction, a certain degree of scorn for the appalling market in unique objects has unavoidably accompanied my agenda. I have lately let myself hate that world, an extreme position which, I confess, has no particular origin story to support it. It’s a world I’ve only brushed up against once or twice myself, with indifferent result. I’ve felt put-upon by the quaint provincialism that seems to have hooded the head of fine art, within my lifetime. But I’ve not been kicked in the balls by painting as I’ve been by my more beloved media of choice.

So, having come clean with my hatred of Wall Art, I feel compelled to wrestle with its stupefying bulk. As ever, my overweening yen is for all the things that unaccountably repulse me. Here are some ugly rectangles for your beautiful, banal homes.

3. The Screen Age

I absorb an embarrassment of television programming. “I use the computer to watch the t.v.,” quips Nomen Novum, one of my favorite Atlanta performers. Sometimes my laptop’s screen will work, and I’ll be able to compartmentalize the two visual information landscapes amiably. Mostly, though, I have Project-Free-TV or Netflix or HBOgo going on behind the TextEdit page I’m writing onto. Or the InDesign booklets I’ve been compulsively making for the past year and a half or so. “It’s insane, this guy’s taint!” sayeth Mr. Show, and indeed it is rudely true.

The rest of the world seems to have discovered what I’ve found within the past few years, which is that nowadays, all the essential imperative mythmaking of our age is happening on television. That’s where we host the realtime autopsy of our body social. A century ago, the novel was proven to be an incomplete system by James Joyce in his Finnegans Wake Theorem. Of course, novels still find us where we live, and the huff and bluster of authorial harrumphing goes on as it ever has, and books of raging beauty will continue to appear for as long as there are assholes who arrogate the unpleasant duties of godhead for themselves. “Art is in its essence arrogant,” Le Corbusier notes in characteristically crisp copy. Yet the zeitgeist is elsewhere.

4. The Future

I yearn for the promise of the Platonic. I contain multiple Socratic conversations and workshop a cosmology not for its truth value but for its capacity to surprise. If I can fit another world-expanding plot twist into the augmented reality I spy from behind these Panglossian goggles, I’ll happily spend another day in this body, in this world, in this shooting bough of probabilistic storylines upon which I lunch and along which I lurch with neither grace nor malice. It may be that I’ve already jumped branches in my ascent of our fruitful tree. Who can tell a crossroads from a mood swing up here in the verdant cockpit? All these tangled limbs, all these variegated stabs of green thrust from their parental branches of assured viability, each seeking and competing for the light of the sun with spazzy, blind jazz-hands of vital storytelling.

5. This Page Intentionally Left Bank

A. Reality is always scripted.

B. Reality television represents the domestication of the human.

C. Reality is a much-maligned word. It needn’t be. It describes exactly what we
think it means in the millionth of a second before we begin to internally
object to its uncomfortably catholic range of assumption. It is the conception of
an ether, not the provable physical manifestation of ether.

D. There is a place for these kinds of words, which describe:
1.) states,
2.) polar dynamics and
3.) verticality in a topography of ontologies exactly like our geographical globe.

6. The Genesis of Book

In the beginning, the word was broken.
It broke into three pieces:

1.) This is the shit.
2.) This is shit.
& 3.) ‘This’ is an anagram for ‘shit.’

This is the triple-chocolate ice cream cone of delight we like to call dialectics.

A philosopher named Hegel uncovered this species of ontological coprophage (shit-eater).

7. ? (!)

…something something—“T.V. hit Missing Here, a violent mélee continuum contagion meme, passed along within a snowglobe of ‘let’s talk about the negative space to an obsessively-horror-vacui’ degree of busy, bizzy byzantiniuum.

The skewered mandala of man, one bead impaled upon an abacus graph, as merely a bladder between two sphincters, is of course lifted entirely from the canonic Index of Mediocrities, while the virgin sense of self is total Westarm Warmall Worldarama -dynasty prime-grime self-blowbanging PoPo-of-MoMo identity-geometrium level of television impabularum [pitch].

AKA the Platosphere [alias Plato’s Retweet]), based upon the free-trade beliefecosym-branded Anal Pastries slurred as “Syllyjismrhetorikillumotherfuckerist meta-artisenalismishnessistsm” by such single-selved idiotms as last year’s passé generation.

They embarrass us now with their Helvetica bland of Etsystsch Eyeronika emblazoned in stark characters across their forearms, so full of stymied story-arcs as to pull off a plasma state of existentially-aggravated Sad(o)Mac-ed booty-challenged Bra(I)ned [brain + brane + raid + parenthetical (like this) ‘I’ + brassiere [b/c of the incident described in the Apocyphal sections of my Auto/Bias/Opic called “The 1982 World’s Not Fair,” sealed until the lapse of actuarial integrity blend of Shep-Helf Theory. hidden assets while kicking rocks. digestive enzymes

Isis: I remember spending money effortlessly at Mediaplay. On the way home from work, giddy with the junksick fixation upon the state of being shunned, babytalking pirated coos of affirmation all in advance of uniform unisex spandex tunics Sanctuary of being alone, it always seemed to be a compulsory stop. I bought the Eno Box Sets one friday at a time. I coveted the undiscovered, whose scent allures, among the aisles of the periodic table of intellectual properties visible to the naked objective. Non-trivial levels of the mystery cult of masked con-men & mothered spoils. We strongly adhere to almost any surface. Do you hear me, Milt Caniff? I see you every day, Kurt Schwitters, and I never don’t need you. Cruel elemental of pulchritudinous puellae, let me give you a number for naught.Iris: Turn down the poesy, pussy. All we are saying is let’s never have a boring conversation between us.Siri: I don’t know how to answer that question in the form of a wrong turn.Innit: Pubs, we’re at the pubs, just like that. An excuse to advance the cause of civilization against the first appearance of unmentionable molestation with radar love, in near mint upon an obelisk to actuarial adulthood made of mylar and nerd behavior. Slight smell of asparagus infused urine.”AC: “Horus the fink-a-saurus.”Ozymandius: “Got my feet on the ground but my head in a jar, The first time it happened, I was like, ‘huh?'” HBO Comedy every night delivered a deferment on divorce, disengagement, death and drug-dragged daath with Bob in cahoots with David.”Michael Stipe: “Stand in the face where you war, now think ‘death.’ —Hey, that’s not my inner voice. That’s not my outside voice suppurating squamous aspersions in aspic beneath a seedbed of strenuous frenulum-chafing handjive, ‘cuz that’s what I was born to do, and so Charles Dickens bred narrative prose storyplay with the coercive rhetoric of fluid stone and superfluous woodwork, and he logged its leverage of sentiment lost at sea and aired on land to fall a wall of art from high to low by glass and twin and back again, in J. J. Jr.’s double-din Chublin, neo-collegiate dandy ephemera.”

1. Don’t correct me if I say ‘two thousand and fourteen’ instead of the more modish ‘twenty fourteen.’ I waited a long time for the year 2000, and have quietly let die the science fiction hopes I once nurtured in its numerical name. So, let it pass in silence when I choose the less modern manner of speaking. Leave me this indulgence, younger ones.

2. I will not side with you or with anyone in social circumstances wherein two familiar faces are set against each other in enmity. I will not broker peace between you, but I will mediate by speaking to each of you alone about the other.

3. We loudly proclaim our investment in freedom and human life, but the louder we raise our voices, the less we actually implement our non-secular humanist agenda.

4. We need a world government which will be wise enough to create a Department of Actuarial Design, which will vary the rate of acceptable risk from a social engineering view. Those ideas which should exist will be given a subsidized charter which will limit its liabilities and elevate its interests just out of the reach of capital consequence.

5. The Singularity event spoken of by Ray Kurzweil, Vernor Vinge, Bill Joy and others is too often spoken of by middle-aged technocrats too validated by life to cede death. Any artist working today has to be a bit of a futurist. We need to consider what the acceptable human loss would be in the event of such a sudden change of state.

6. We will encounter other viable branches of pyramid-possessing worldlines when our predictive simulacrum of the alien is found to contain a reasonably-precise model of us.

7. The fifth dimension is story.

8. The viral element which draws us in again and again boils down to a germinal disconnect: ‘Is this person crazy or are they savvy?’

1.Tantamount to braggery: Braggadocioto!2. An errand in the egg salad sandwich night.3. Karla hearts Smiley.4. I can be friends with anyone, and will always rather lose than play you out.5. If we still had that old-fashioned narrative mattress between us, we’d totally be boning by now.6. “Supernuance” Sunday on the Alpha channel; no sexdolls allowed.7. Comfort now or conflict always never after (‘Oh, you’re incorrigible’ she selected to make her vintage).8. I live all moments in the path of the pestilent princess O my Ponzi Queen: Look at me like I’m a suicide accessory.9. Whatwhat: “We live in a legal aside.”10. We burst into 1,000,000,000 faces and enter, tainted, into our looking glass mimicry of mirrorhood as Marxed into memory, mimsy were the moths of bother and beyond the monolithic blithering bowman.

11. Dad took me to another interminable Georgia Tech football game. I closed my eyes to it and learned the hurtful bias that pays for all my pain. Primitive man, posits our dear fellow-sufferer, noticed familial subdivisions amongst bastards. Yr put-upon quadriplegic is on call to every erection. I writhe in elective mutilation under the heel of a hellfuried woman awash in the vulgate of “mean.”12. For the lion’s share of tygers, I hated every last motherfucking one of you with livid distress and daily. I didn’t want your approval, your scorn, your glossy pink smirks or your securities exchange. I wanted only to pass under your noses, undetectable, unmolested.13. Beavercreek Roundtree East Valley Sewell Mill Old Roswell Cobb Parkway Delk Windy Hill 1977 Mrs. Schmidt second grade unskip unskip unskip14. Bifocals calculator watch, Micronauts pneumatic tube.15. Lockbox, spider-crickets, red clay, mica, Kennesaw Mountain, field trip bull-whip. Jay ——- was my best friend for a bit.16. He was allowed to watch whatever television however much he willed according to his personal untethered will. He had more than all of the Star Wars licensed totems, so playtime at his house was fully licensed by force.

17. He was chatty and goofy, affable and amenable to persuasion. He draws comics because you talk him into it, but then you realize his stories and characters are way better than yours, and you’re not sure how to be aware of that without resenting him for it. His best villain is Mr. Grinmile, whose head is like a crescent moon lolling on its back. You won’t be his friend much longer; he turns into the same ugly white southern baptist as a thousand other kids at school.

18. Puberty is a betrayal of childhood, and it makes you feel like the evillest thing in the world.

19. Boys learn where the mass for mass is held. Zoom zoom and the mastery of space! Esoteric codex of the alienated.

20. Girls take all the time they need to find the hovering dingus of defeated “dude” animism. What do I pray for in those moments of bruised banana castration? An emasculated grace gold-leafs a circle around my head.21. a.) Sees beyond bars of cage b.) Am I good or bad? c.) Does anyone need me? d.) What is highest hardest best?

22. Look at me—look at your son’s smartass smirkface. Are you aware your face is unmasked right now, and that I can clearly see your visceral disgust for me. I can’t remember not feeling fully your dislike of me. Sour stomach schoolbus, and I have no defense against the bullies of this shitty world because I know I deserve anything that makes me feel unfit to live. Fear surrenders to cowed self-hatred and a longing for death that extends globally. You await the bombs that will obliterate the human pestilence forever. You are led to believe that any day now, you’ll be excused from further harrassment.

23. Dad buzzes within a beehive of simultaneous sports, stonefaced until outrage activates the red-faced petulant despot and every time he yells, it might as well be at you. This is what you will become. This is what I am. I find people who will make me feel like shit, who will unleash that anger on me. I hunger for it with more of an appetite than the one I feel for food.

24. Dancing autochthons attend their mourning mass with diffidence. Those athletes endemic to the environ edify the unyielding moonwatcher idiom of disingenuous sabre-rattlers. 2001 was the last film that need have been made. Finnegans Wake the last novel. Klimt’s kiss killed wall art. Scientology crippled hierarchical seating charts of scheming confidence-man group psychosis eye in the best story ever made from this raw material.

25. I can see brief clips of land-like terrain avast the full fathom five players at most, attack Kamchatka with three-die fortune.26. You saw me broken into a homunculus of pain-receptors.

27. I reproach myself still for my cowardly slide into the beaten, slavish social affect of fully human search engine american idol initiates who have an assumed opinion of many books, many minds, and yet nakedly fail to make a mind or to write a book. Spin our secret tells into a telemetry of empathic sweater-vest struck crushed and gender-dysphoric in warmth and comfort.

28. Leonard, Leonard in my head—you laugh, but we are “in a world of shit.”

29. My world went from Atlas Shrugged to Naked Lunch in a summer’s crash cart college course in cruelly indifferent modes of capital accrual and how it, in its boundless growth, grows weedy, unwanted variants of devalued quality as a wash for the default greats of a mediocre era.

30. I am 16 and no longer pure & chaste. I am far worse than the faggot you see (‘Where’s the blood?’) beflood you.

31. I walked into my parents’ room and opened the dresser drawers until I found my prize. What sweet sick shriek of scent-dissonant syntactical arrears hath accrued upon your house? I would wish I was gay, but it seemed an ill fit.

33. I was high and magnanimous one day when M—— and I had a mutually inclusive session, booked by way of craigslist’s erotic services section (RIP). Soft fat hairy pelt of repellant commercial real estate broker. He wanted to negotiate for our outlying markers. The thrill of the haggle got him harder than any wiggle of flesh.

34. I was malleable, ludicrous, gullible, servile, treacherous and opportunistic. My pa could see right through me to the rum one of the bunch, as it were.

35. Mom makes us as an oyster makes pearls; dad casts us at swine or collars our dad’s little boy / eunuch / Fake Chicks on Speed shirt. I kissed his satanic anus and even tried to poke Mr. Imp O’Tent tiny penis through the Chester Brown redrawn variant Eds the Happy Clowny Clown Clown. Man about town, inventor of the Colonel Mustard sandwich, accepts my cash offer for a placeholder position between vacuum, hell and fatherland.36. I’m sniffing at the anus of fame. I dodge calls from someone in Europe who wants me to do a cover for a Sebadoh single. What an idiot, right? I don’t know. Some Book of Job workout routine is key to arousal / refusal: assassins of pure, perfect will.

37. I tried to shake him; he was tremendously excited by my unwillingness to accept him as a client, after that first encounter. “My money’s as good as anyone’s,” he argued.

38. We all have to start somewhere, and the name of our initial somewhere is: BIAS.

39. I start off white, male, protestant, welshirishenglishscotsgerman Johnsons call McMe. William Momsdad = blacksheep smooth-talker and personal tragic flaw to my mother’s mother Dobbie, who spoils me splendidly, and to whom I commend the captain’s seat of actuarial discretion with regard to the quotient of my rites of penitence to my pupal replications of second cousins’ kissing step-lawyers.

40. He ripped me off, the night I learned to always get cash up front. I pursued him to his vehicle, fell in the street, felt genuinely wounded, felt yucky and betrayed by______?

41. The moment I put on my mother’s utilitarian brassiere, I strapped myself in for a mystical, magical ride up to the syzygy of tantric rigor sponsored by big-business fuck / kill / marry triage.42. Partial bibliography of books read between 1985 and 1990, in no particular order: